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Following my sword and sorcery questions, I remembered I actually used to watch one and actually enjoyed it, despite its hamminess, Xena: Warrior Princess. Now, I'm not gonna say I was wrong about noble savages (because I can't make mistakes, ya know) as she is more of a Mary Sue, plus she's usually the one who tries to go the pacifist route with her recurring enemy being Ares, the OG god of war.
However, Xena (the show) also suffers because of that.
The show tries to apply modern values to age and mythology that clearly operated under a different one. To be fair, these modern values are mostly exclusive for Xena.
Poor Hades can't catch a break. Also, there was that time when Xena began killing off gods to pave the path for the "god of love"... thank Dawkins I didn't see those episodes.
Now, I can actually argue in other works using greek myth that those two issues are the same. If you saw Lindsay Ellis' Loose Canon episode on Hades you know what I'm talking about. Hades is often confused/conflated with Satan because he resides in the underworld and as you know, Christianity really loves to infect everything and integrate them into its hive mind of stupid until the original thing is lost, so much for the "War on Christmas".
I want to avoid that as much as possible. The problem is with keeping the "original" myth and also abiding by my own Hays Code.
I want to preserve the myth because it feels disingenuous not to. I mean, greek myth is filled with sex, infidelity, rape, bestiality... and gays. Taking all of that away kills its "essence". However, most of that stuff is violating my Hays code, assuming they go unpunished.
Here's a more concrete example of my problem:
I had a story idea in mind. You are familiar with the story of the Minotaur, right?
Basically, there was this Minos guy and blah blah, Poseidon gave Minos a white bull he had to sacrifice to him, blah blah, he didn't so Poseidon made his wife have ..... with that white bull, from which born the minotaur.
Now, according to what I read, the minotaur wasn't immediately thrown into the labyrinth only after it began having an appetite for human flesh. All I have to add is making Poseidon responsible for that change in diet and boom:
Suddenly, Asterius becomes much more sympathetic and tragic. However, this also means that he is now protected under my code, which strictly prohibits punishing characters for things beyond their control. The curse of a god, done clearly to punish a relative of the individual, most definitely counts. So, Theseus now can't kill him, a rather big part of the story thrown into the bin, IMHO.
This will happen almost every time I change small things, yet for that brief initial part, it feels like poetry. I mean, the minotaur's original name, Asterius, means star; isn't that cute? Wouldn't it make more sense for him to be, you know, a tragic character?
I understand that myths also have cultural backgrounds and are still stories in the end. When I talk about identity, I mean the story itself and its context, but not the underlying symbolism. So, in the case of this one, Athens having to pay tributes to Crete and the ending of that is present as a part of the story, not what the story symbolizes.
This is an "I want to eat the cake but still have it" type of problem. Changes to the myths are inevitable if I want to follow through with my code, but I still want to keep as much of their "identity" as possible. How should I do that?
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It seems to me that there are two issues you're dealing with here. First, there's your personal 'Hayes' code, which keeps you from discussing certain behaviors. That isn't much of a problem, really; proper use of indirection, allusion, euphemism and other forms of ellipsis can let you skirt topics you don't want to deal with, at the cost of making your writing a little more flowery (the typical result of tiptoeing around subjects).
The other problem — the issue of applying modern values to ancient mythology — is merely a matter of perspective-taking. XWP intentionally broke the value-systems of ancient myths, because the show wasn't really about those myths; it was a pro-feminist modern myth using tropes from ancient mythology. If you want to preserve the sense of the ancient myths then you have to go beyond the mere actions presented in them and look at the relationships between people that the myths try to present. Greek mythology in particular is psychologically complex. A Greek hero is someone who is placed within an 'impossible' situation — one that is physically and/or intellectually challenging, and riddled with moral conflicts — and has to work his way out through his own strength, intelligence, and wisdom. The gods are (often as not) foils who trap the hero into these impossible situations, and the hero's success or failure at navigating these impossibilities marks the difference between a heroic and tragic tale.
The story of the Minotaur is a perfect example. On one hand you have Minos, who is cursed with a son who is a monster (through Minos' own fault, because he refused to sacrifice a bull that a god gave to him explicitly for sacrifice). He cannot kill his son, but cannot allow the monster his son has become to go free, so he built the labyrinth to contain the Minotaur, the way a rich modern family might hide a child who commits murder from the police. On the other hand, you have the king of Athens, who is forced to pay tribute to Minos, because the Athenians killed Minos' other son, Androgeus. In some versions of the story Athens is forced to pay tribute because Minos attacked the city in retribution for Androgeus and won the war; in other versions the gods subjected Athens to a plague unless they sent tribute. In either case, the tribute was seven young men and women who were to be killed by Minos' remaining son, the Minotaur:Â the bloodline of Minos taking vengeance.
Into this absolute moral morass steps Theseus, who tries to chart the only course that can resolve the problem: he will slay the Minotaur, ending the curses that have been afflicted on both Minos and Athens, and saving the lives of other young men and women of his city. It's not an elegant solution or a perfect one, but it's the only solution in a world where snippy, squabbling gods place everyone between a rock and a hard place. Theseus doesn't have the luxury of worrying whether he is slaying Asterius (beloved son of Minos) or the Minotaur (horrible, murderous monster); he cannot worry about whether the creature is guilty or guiltless, because the creature is a curse on two cities, and the curse has to end. Worrying about such issues (from the Greek perspective) would be selfish and virtueless.
Of course, the modern Christian mythos wants to say there is a non-violent solution, because it has inverted the heroic trope into heroic sacrifice: "this is my body, to be given to you...". God's love is the solution to all moral dilemmas in the Christian worldview, because Christians break the moral universe down into one single source of 'good' and (possibly, depending on sect) one single source of 'evil.' The Greek world populated the cosmos with numerous powerful, competing, and morally ambiguous forces, so heroes in the Greek world had to be foxes; they couldn't afford to be sheep. But as long as you capture the sense of the relationships these ancient stories portray, and the moral dilemmas those relationships raise, you won't stray too far from the stories' original intent.
You appear to be only reading half the subtext of the myth of the minotaur:
As the Minotaur grew, he became ferocious, and devoured human flesh for sustenance. We then have 2 scenarios:
If the Minotaur was a dumb, mindless beast, then any meat would do - eating a human once or twice would be no "worse" than a lion doing so. Once penned in the labyrinth, it could be fed a diet of meat, much like the hunting dogs. Killing it is then putting down a dangerous animal, in self defence.
The other option is that the Minotaur is an intelligent being, and that the preference for eating human flesh is a deliberate act. In which case, this is no longer "punishment for something beyond his control", but the actions of a cannibalistic psychopath, who refuses to accept that eating humans is wrong.
And, in either case, the Minotaur is being used as a cruel method of execution by King Minos
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